Tony Hawk Unveils New Hot Wheels Fingerboard Line—Including Limited Birdhouse Life-Size Skateboard Deck

Hot Wheels was a major part of skateboarder Tony Hawk’s childhood. How could it not have been? As the action sports legend points out, he and the brand were both born in the same year—1968.

In fact, Hawk credits Hot Wheels as getting the figurative gears in his head turning for one of his most iconic skateboarding feats—the 360-degree Loop of Death stunt, which he first completed in 1998 (a full year before he would make history by landing the first 900 on a vert ramp at X Games V).

So it’s no surprise that Hawk jumped at the opportunity to team up with Hot Wheels on the scale model car company’s first-ever fingerboard line, Hot Wheels Skate. Just as the Mattel-owned Hot Wheels brand emerged as a scale model car competitor to Matchbox in 1968 (with Mattel later buying Matchbox’s parent company, Tyco Toys), the Hot Wheels fingerboards now enter a space currently dominated by X-Concept’s Tech Deck fingerboards, which launched in the late 1990s.

The Hot Wheels Skate line, which was announced Wednesday and is available in early August, is meant to be the most inclusive in fingerboarding, featuring shoes that clip onto the boards to make tricks easier for beginners to master. Experienced fingerboarders can use the boards without the shoes.

“The learning curve is pretty steep for fingerboarding, so the shoes are a unique element,” Hawk told me.

The line of fingerboards, which includes five separate products, features designs created by the Hot Wheels design team in collaboration with Hawk and replications of some of Hawk’s most famous Birdhouse designs, including the falcon, flying falcon and skull imagery.

The products range in price from $2.99 (a single fingerboard and clip-on shoes) to $29.99 (an amusement park playset featuring a fingerboard, shoes and park-themed obstacles. There is also a set that matches a fingerboard and shoes to a Hot Wheels diecast car ($5.99), a multi-pack assortment that includes four assembled fingerboards featuring iconic Birdhouse designs and two pairs of skate shoes ($11.99) and a drop-in skatepark set including a board and shoes ($14.99). (Hawk called the playsets “much more irreverent than I imagined.”)

The products are available in store and online exclusively at WalmartWMT
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The pièce de résistance of the collection, however, is certainly the Hot Wheels x Tony Hawk life-size Birdhouse skateboard deck and matching fingerboard.

Only 100 boards, all signed by Hawk, will be sold on July 29 and will be available exclusively at MattelCreations.com starting at $350.

As part of its collaboration with Hawk, Hot Wheels will also make a donation to his foundation, The Skatepark Project (previously Tony Hawk Foundation). Since it was established in 2002, the foundation has funded 652 skatepark projects across all 50 states. The Skatepark Project has also provided guidance and advocacy training to thousands of skatepark projects worldwide.

“I’m thankful that Hot Wheels chose to support our foundation The Skatepark Project. Mostly it’s a validation that a big company like that believes in our work and believes in skateparks as something that is good for youth,” Hawk said.

“Skating was considered an outcast, misfit activity when I was a kid and even through the ’90s and early 2000s. It was misunderstood, and skateparks were not embraced. The irony is the kids were labeled outlaws because they didn’t have a place to go. We were able to change that narrative a bit with public skateparks.”

Since skateboarding made its debut on the Olympic Program in the Tokyo Games last summer, Hawk notes, there has been even more interest—especially internationally—in community skatepark projects.

“The thing that’s changed since the Olympic debut is the inclusivity factor is very much equal in terms of race, gender, age; if you have a skateboard, you’re welcome into the fold,” Hawk said. “It’s something that has been a long time coming, something I’ve always believed it in but has been hard to present because skating was so male dominated through the decades. Once it exploded on TV and people saw there were these 14-year-old girls and people from all countries that are killing it, and a camaraderie that you don’t see in other sports, that shined through.”

Removing accessibility barriers is a major step toward making skateboarding more diverse and developing the next generation of talent, but those skaters who choose to go the contest route also need competitions willing to pay them equitably.

Vert skating, especially, faces a dearth of paid contest opportunities—only park and street skating were included in the Olympics. X Games, which wrapped last week, features a vert competition and debuted a new “megapark” discipline this summer, but only men were able to compete in the vert events.

In 2021, Hawk, the athlete whose name is synonymous with the discipline, redoubled his efforts to resurrect it. He launched Tony Hawk’s Vert Alert, what he hopes will become an annual vert skating contest that crowns a men’s champion, a women’s champion and award prizes for men’s and women’s best trick, as well.

The event also features a Legends Demo where, in 2021, the legends of the sport (and likely your chosen Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater main) all took to Hawk’s traveling ramp—Bob Burnquist, Bucky Lasek, Andy Macdonald, Christian Hosoi, Mike Frazier, Sandro Dias and Lincoln Ueda.

Vert Alert will return on August 26-27 this year, once again held at the Utah State Fairpark in Salt Lake City.

“I’m proud of the noise we made last year and the success of Vert Alert. We’re trying to provide a stage for people who choose to skate vert and we have equal disciplines for male and female skaters,” Hawk said. “Vert skating is an underappreciated discipline in skateboarding, absolutely one of the most exciting for spectators.”

Hawk will be the first to praise park skating and clarifies he isn’t taking anything away from it. But, as an example of what he means, he points to Aussie Keegan Palmer’s winning run in the Olympics men’s park event—punctuated by his kickflip body varial 540. It was a massive feat—the first time the trick had been landed in a major park contest.

And yet: “That was one trick of 12 more difficult tricks that [13-year-old Brazilian skateboarder] Gui Khury did in his run [at X Games last week],” Hawk said. “People don’t understand that [vert] is a different level of technical difficulty in comparison to park skating. I love park skating, and there is a certain nuance and style and skill set people need to navigate the terrain. But for true aerial and acrobating aspects, it’s all about vert. We wanna promote that.”

It’s unclear if Hawk himself will be able to participate in the Legends Demo again this year. He broke his right femur in March in a nasty fall from his warehouse ramp.

It was the same week HBO dropped the trailer for the documentary about Hawk’s life, Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off. Hawk was set to present at the Oscars alongside fellow action sports icons Shaun White and Kelly Slater, and he wasn’t about to let the injury stop him.

He set about his recovery methodically—perhaps maniacally. He didn’t miss the Oscars. Now, four months later, he’s back on his ramp attempting Caballerials. Don’t ever doubt Tony Hawk.

Part of what the HBO documentary captured so well was Hawk’s mostly graceful, but sometimes seemingly painful transition from competition and life on his board to the business of running his brand. He is learning to come to terms with the inevitable process of aging (hey, it’s better than the alternative) and figuring out what he can and can’t still do on the ramp at the age of 54. With his new Hot Wheels fingerboards, however, he and the brand—now both middle aged—can return to childhood.